Crowstep
24d ago
There's definitely some other studies showing that graduate women are marrying high-earning non-graduate men, like your plumber friend. That explains how graduate women have been able to maintain their high marriage rate despite a lack of graduate men to go around.
How did the wives of your friend compare to him in terms of age and educational credentials?
Crowstep
24d ago
Boys don't like girls, boys like postgrad housewives
What does the man with a lot of romantic options want?
Does he want a beautiful young trophy wife? Does he want a high-earning girlboss?
The answer, according to Lyman Stone, is neither. What he wants (according to the data) is a woman around his age, with the same academic qualifications. Men with younger (and indeed, older) wives are the ones earning less money. What rich men want, it seems, is a (cultural, educational) peer.
With earnings is becomes a bit more complicated. As a man's income goes up, so does the income of his wife. But richer men earn a larger proportion of household income, and the women married to these men are the most likely to not work at all.
So what's going on here? The Red Pill explanation of men preferring younger women doesn't seem to fit, since the men with the most options (high earning ones) are more like to choose women the same age. However, these couples also choose housewifery at the highest rate. My interpretation of this is that the more money a man earns, the more secure in their class position the couple can be. Therefore, they can afford to have the wife give up work without losing their place in the class hierarchy.
The bitter professional woman explanation (men are intimidated by my qualifications and high salary) doesn't seem to work either. Sure, wives of rich men are the least likely to work, but those that do work are also the highest earners among women. A more parsimonious explanation seems to be that high earning women want higher earning men, and they (mostly) get them.
High earning men seem to want class peers. A woman's qualifications are a marker for class, and a woman's high salary is a manifestation of her class. Of course, once married, they can afford for her to stay home more easily than poorer families.
The thing that surprises me most is that you don't see richer men marrying younger women, as all of the older-younger pairings I've seen in real life have involved high-earning men. It might be that richer men marry younger, and therefore there is simply less scope for large age gaps. Or it might be that richer men are more sensitive to judgement from their peers, who would disapprove of larger age gaps.
Crowstep
24d ago
The Divine Economy, by Paul Seabright.
Basically it's a look at religion through the lens of consumer economics. It can be a bit dry at times (although thankfully there's no equations so far) but otherwise it's really interesting. Living in the secular West it's good to be reminded that, for most of the world, religion is a huge part of daily life and is genuinely important.
Crowstep
27d ago
Americans are taught from a young age that we "shouldn't judge a book by its cover," that we should "judge by the content of their character," that we "ought to walk a mile in their shoes," and so on
The argument is particularly strange when the book is literally choosing to draw its own cover. It makes as much sense to judge a tattoo as it does to judge something that someone has written on a piece of paper and handed to me.
I guess my problem with 'root causes' strategies is that the root cause of most crime is 'he's just like that'. Most 'root causes' that get highlighted by activists are just correlates of criminality (e.g. poverty) not causes. If poverty caused crime then our grandparents' generation (in every developed country) would have been extremely criminal during their youth, and they weren't.
More options
Context Copy link